Why does it seem like all the unimportant, easy stuff gets done first? Look up The Urgency Bias. Employing simplified games and real-life consequential choices, we provide evidence for “urgency bias”, showing that people prefer working on urgent (vs. important) tasks that have shorter (vs. longer) completion window however involving smaller (vs. bigger) outcomes, even when task difficulty, goal gradient, outcome scarcity and task interdependence are held constant.- Zhu, Yeng, Hsee (2014) Even when task difficulty, goal gradient, outcome scarcity AND task interdependence is held constant, urgency wins. Even when it would be more beneficial to do something important instead of something urgent, even when you’re painfully made aware of those incentives, you still gravitate towards doing the urgent. There’s[…]